The camera is long since packed away. Thassa needs to keep talking now, about anything at all, so long as it dates back before the last three months. She’s like some infected farm animal, brought low by something it can’t even imagine. Microbes without borders. Her system struggles to reject this invasion, as it would any alien tissue. His job is to keep talking, to hold up his end of the trivia as if everything will come right again, if they only imagine.
Even now, just riding alongside her helps him recognize himself. If he could drive with her in this car until he learned the habit by heart, the certainty of who he is, equal to the brief, scattered days he’s been given
She means more to him now, stunned, than she did when she rode the world.
Pointless tenderness, evolution’s ultimate trick. The product of a handful of genes, hitting on strategies to keep themselves in play. A force three billion years in the making, coughing up a thing ridiculously makeshift and erratic, more wasteful than the peacock’s tail. Stone tags along behind a caravan of SUVs, tooling north. Maybe even love is just a minor node in a vast network pushing toward new and unimaginable exploits
Candace should be with them. She loves this woman as much as anyone.
In the neck of upstate New York, Thassa falls asleep. She goes slack in her seat, slumping onto Stone’s shoulder. There’s a burr that sounds like a problem with the engine. Then he places it: she’s humming in her sleep. A simple, repetitive tune built on no scale Stone recognizes. He thinks he hears her chant the word vava When she wakes ten minutes later, he doesn’t ask her what song she was dreaming, and she doesn’t volunteer.
They track north along the edge of Lake Ontario. Late afternoon is done and evening layers in. The sun falters, and they’ve been driving so long that the highway starts to float. They pass through an enfilade of pines flanking the road. They roll down the windows. The dry, cool air plays on their skin and their hearts crack open.
The day is late, and they know each other now in the way that only two people stuck together in a car forever can. “You know,” he tells her, his eyes three hundred yards down the road, “it’s funny. I think about that old woman all the time. I go through long stretches where I think about her almost every day.”
“What old woman, Russell?”
He’s shocked that she can’t read his mind. “The one you wrote about for your first paper. The one who took forever to climb a few stairs of the Cultural Center.”
He feels her studying his profile. She asks, “Why do you think about her?”
He’s wondered about this, too, almost as long as he’s wondered about the woman. He can’t say why, but he can say something. “You did, in two pages, without effort, what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. You took the simplest, most ordinary thing-something I’ve rushed past a thousand times a day-and lifted You made her next step the only thing in existence worth worrying about. I think about the woman, whether she’s still alive, what she’s doing right now, whether she could still make it up those stairs, nine months later.”
“No,” Thassa says. “She can’t.”
He turns to look at her. The car hits the right shoulder rumble strip, and he jerks it back into the lane.
“There is no woman,” Thassa says.
“I don’t There’s what?”
“You said creative.”
He keeps his eye on the median, watching his past revise. “You’re saying you made her up?”
She waves to a tinted-window minivan passing them. “I assembled from some separate parts. Things I’ve seen.”
“But the real ” He has to stop talking. They pass a mile and a half in silence. She studies the thickets of pine. He does the two breathing exercises that Candace taught him.
A lentil-sized thought at the base of his brain swells to a chickpea. “Your father,” he asks, as calm as midnight. “How did he die?”
“You read about it,” she answers, just as calmly.
“Yes. I did.”
“He was shot,” Thassa says. “In the civil war.”
“By someone else?” Those two finch-eyed holes in the man’s skull
She doesn’t confirm. Or deny.
He thinks: the depression gene, just waiting for the right environment to flower. But his own native spinelessness overcomes Stone, and question time is over. They drive for a long time, through no more than a hair’s breath, on the map. The flanking pines and spruce fall away to a sunny clearing. He asks, “Has this ever happened to you before?”
She smiles at him, an echo of her smile on the first day of class. “This?” That radiance again, hounded by the hungry, clutched by the desperate, reduced by the scientific, dissected by the newshounds, stoned by the religious, bid on by the entrepreneurs, denounced by the disappointed. “ This? Antecedent, Mister Stone!”
For a moment, he sees her on the night of the ice storm. But he wipes away that memory, a nuisance spiderweb. “Is this the first time you’ve ever felt yourself coming apart?”
She puts her sunglasses back on. Her fingers rake shaky lines through her colored hair. “Is that what’s happening to me?”
They’re saved from themselves by the sealike St. Lawrence. They glimpse the islands multiplying on that broad boundary, wooded, still, and sovereign. The spread of highway collapses into a clogged line of vehicles waiting to pass the border check. Under her breath, Thassa half chants a thanksgiving that Stone can’t make out.
It dawns on Russell that he’s about to cross a national border with an Algerian. The press has been diligent these days with rumors and counter-rumors, factions linked to Al Qaeda, an entity that is itself either a finely tuned worldwide network or a fake post-office box. Stone never even noticed the reports until this woman dragged him into the world. In a minute he’ll have to convince an official that he and this woman aren’t sworn to the destruction of any major Christian industrial democracies. With luck, the official might be an Oona fan.
The four lanes of traffic lengthen to a dozen vehicles deep. New cars arrive faster than the old ones clear. A jitter on the newswires, maybe, or Canadian retaliation for some American slight. Every third car is routed off to a holding area and searched. If everyone came out of their protective shells to mill around in political confusion, this would be one of those great scenes of collective meltdown from contemporary developing-world fiction.
They pull up to the border guard, whose day has clearly been longer than their own. But Thassa’s bright “Hello, bonjour!” softens him some. She hands over her Canadian passport, and Stone surrenders his driver’s license.
The guard hands back Russell’s license. “Passport, please.”
Stone laughs, then doesn’t. “I’m sorry. I’m an American. We don’t ”
The guard does his own deep-breathing exercise. He’s more or less ready for the system of nation-states to break down, and Stone, the millionth ignorant prince he’s had to deal with on this matter, has been put on earth merely to mortify him. “The rules have changed, sir. You can still get into Canada with a driver’s license. But you need a passport to get back into the States.”
“What’s happened? Has something happened?”
The man looks at Stone as if he’s dropped down from another planet. “Read much?”